Mona is my generation's Sydney Opera House, a gamble that paid off

David Walsh’s ‘anti-museum’ on the banks of the Derwent river in Tasmania has beaten Moma and Tate Modern to be named the world’s best modern art gallery. But part of Mona’s magic is that it feels like a dream

The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in images taken from Mona’s Instagram feed

How cool it must have been to live through the construction and the opening of the Sydney Opera House in the mid 20th century. I imagine there was the feeling of something new and wonderful being created – not just for an elite with certain tastes and money, but for everyone.

That’s how I feel about the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Mona is my generation’s Opera House. You may only go there once in your life (or not at all) but it’s comforting to know that it’s there (it’s hard to miss, really, looking like an enormous hybrid cruise ship-submarine that’s crashed into the cliffs along the Derwent).

The fact that it’s even there in the first place is a kind of service. It doesn’t ask much of you except that you attend it with an open mind. Even then it doesn’t really give a fig whether you do or don’t.

Yes, there’s great food and brilliant art and the setting is incredible. It’s arguably rescued Tasmania from decline and fall, and instigated a dramatic reversal of not only fortune but tone and mood. In its wake are new boutique hotels, mom and pop Airbnb operators, baristas, craft beer bars – all the accoutrements that accompany the cultural economy. It’s the Guggenheim to Tasmania’s Bilbao.

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But Mona is more than just an economic engine. It’s a big, expensive art gamble by Tasmanian David Walsh that asks of us: “Can you take something that encompasses a suicide bomber made of chocolate, a bacteria machine that simulates digestion (odours included) and a room full of televisions showing people performing karaoke; can you take something that you don’t even like – that you find revolting or ugly – and still call it your own?”

The answer of course was yes. The big gamble paid off.

Built without government assistance and costing $180m, the museum drew 600,000 visitors in its first 18 months, surpassing Walsh’s expectations. On Thursday it was named in Lonely Planet’s List of 500 Best Places in the World, as the world’s best modern art gallery, beating New York’s Moma and London’s Tate Modern.

In a lengthy New Yorker profile of Walsh by a fellow Tasmanian, Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan, Mona was described as being “like a mashup of the lost city of Petra and a late night out in Berlin”. It was the “ultimate senseless chance”, Flanagan continued. “Walsh wanted an anti-museum that challenged every shibboleth – anything, as he put it, ‘that pisses off the academics’.”

I love a Hermitage collection or the French impressionists that Australia’s big state galleries bring out from the old countries as much as anyone. But Mona’s beauty and swagger come from the fact that it doesn’t curate a polite, culturally appropriate school-excursion-to-the-gallery experience. It’s egalitarian and playful, it’s a place of shallows and depths – just not where you expect to find them.

There you are slack-jawed in wonder at a gorgeous piece of video art of a seagull, then less enthralled at a wall covered in vaginas, before being captivated but also bored by the Google word waterfall.

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At no point do you get the feeling that you should like this art, or at least appreciate it, and that if you don’t appreciate it, there’s something wrong with you. Philistine.

When news emerged of Walsh’s conflict with the Australian Taxation Office, there seemed to be a collective intake of breath. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that support was flooding in for the Mona founder, which is not something you read about often when you hear of gambling syndicate members in taxation disputes.

There was a sense that Mona was not something we take for granted, that we want it to work and to live on because it says something about the nation we are becoming.

For Flanagan, Mona is not the exception to but a continuation of Tasmania’s DNA. “Tasmania is better understood as a place of extremes, radicalism and unreality, and Mona is merely its latest manifestation,” he wrote in the New Yorker.

Part of the Mona magic is that despite its solidity, despite our desire for it to live forever, it’s as chimeric and as dreamlike as that late night out in Berlin. And like the gambler there’s a sense that at any moment it could fold.

The last time I went to Mona, I didn’t even walk through its doors but had an experience that will stay with me for a long time. It was summer and rainy, about 4.30am. A friend picked me up from my hotel and we drove out on the highway, the only car on the road, looking for the turnoff to Mona.

In the pre-dawn we found the James Turrell light sculpture, a structure, like a gazebo, that framed the sky. We lay on beanbags in the rain, with one or two other people sitting nearby, but obscured by the dark. Gradually dawn came, and we watched the sky change colour like a magic painting.

There was no plaque nearby or guide to tell us what this artwork meant or how we should feel. And I still don’t know what it means except that it was beautiful, and felt – with several of us lying on pink cushions, shivering in the cold pavilion – quite strange.

Is Mona the best modern art gallery in the world? I’m just happy that it’s a question we can even ask: and for that, a big thank you to David Walsh.